


What's the Use of Wondrin'

by Suvroc (cuteandillusion)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Weird Fluff, darker stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:28:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24047428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuteandillusion/pseuds/Suvroc
Summary: I started a collection of fluff, and there are certain short pieces that don't fit there, so this is a place for them. Ratings / tags / warnings to be updated as needed.1. No One Deems You Worthy (of reward or punishment)2. With a Thought: Hell's orders used to appear, all cold and uninvited, in his brain. He had hated that. This is different.3. In the Dark of the Night (Crowley's nightmare)
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	1. No One Deems You Worthy (of reward or punishment)

Crowley wasn’t sure if Aziraphale realized how wretched he felt. How wrong and off and out-of-sorts. They’d arranged themselves as they had numerous times before, in their regular places upon the sofa. Aziraphale was reading, and absently caressed the side of his face, and the stroking helped. Just a little. But he knew he needed more.

Aziraphale ran a fingers from his neck, over his chin, moving to touch him through the heat and the confusion as Crowley parted his lips in a moan, his teeth chattering on the inhale. He let his mouth drop open and Aziraphale dipped his thumb inside. Crowley couldn’t stop himself. With a stilted sigh he drew the digit in, sucking mercilessly, tongue forking down the center and wrapping tightly around it. He gasped, salivating and pulsating the suckle. His hand drew up against it and he held on for dear life.

Eventually he calmed, like a young animal falling into the rhythm of nursing. The muscles around his eyes relaxed as he worked his tongue and his cheeks wetly around the finger. His grip too loosened to rest gently against the back of Aziraphale’s hand. He almost felt like dozing.

Then he tensed. The pad of Aziraphale’s thumb was wrinkling against his tongue, beginning to pucker. He pulled it out with only a quiet ‘pop’ and his eyes flew open, scandalized.

“Why’d you let me do that!” he demanded, his voice thin like a crystal frozen pond. Broken and cold. Aziraphale hardly moved, but his eyes widened a bit as he took in the question.

“Well. You liked it?”

Crowley screwed up his face. “ Yes. But did you?”

“My darling, I like it when you’re happy.”

Crowley felt his face crumple and he buried it into the pillow of Aziraphale’s lap. “I don’t deserve you.”

“My dear, no one 'deserves’ anything.” He placed his book to the side and stroked Crowley’s hair with one hand, drawing his fingers back across his lips with the other. “Nobody deserves any of this. Please. It’s alright. If you like. Whatever you need, I am here for you.”

Crowley looked up from the plushness of his thigh, his eyes only a little red. He drew the angel’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “I’m ok. It’s nothing.” He closed his eyes, and the lines around them gentled. “You’re too good,” he said, but didn’t mean it.


	2. With a Thought

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hell's orders used to appear, all cold and uninvited, like shards of ice obtrusively forced into his brain. 
> 
> He had _hated_ that.
> 
> This is different.

_“Lovely.”  
_ _“Sweetheart”_

Crowley felt the words drop into his head like coins in a fountain – wishes cast to the great wide world. Like pebbles in a still pond.

_“Lovely.”  
_ _“Sweetheart.”_

Unlike the searingly chilly knowledge of Satan’s orders, these appeared gently and without any request for action or response. Gifts really.

A cool sensation. Calm. Like ice cubes tinkling into a glass on a hot day.

He wondered if Aziraphale even knew he was doing it.

Crowley rolled the words around, shifting them over in his reality, letting them slot into different areas of his brain without preconception. Without assumption. They were sweet and perfect, like chocolate bonbons. They were simple. They were. His.

And he didn’t feel, as he had in the past when thinking about such things, back when these confections were only the vague and almost wildly comical “possibilities” - at the and achingly raw and exposed times he even allowed them to be entertained - he didn’t feel angry at himself. Disappointed and scolding and wrong. Bad.

There was none of that.

_“Lovely.”_

You can feel a certain way about someone in a vacuum, thinking you are all self-contained and private. But eventually, the world will breech you, and collapse it all. And the world as you know it will end.

In bed next to Aziraphale, hearing his thoughts as clear as crystal, it was the end of the world over and over again.

And Crowley felt fine.


	3. In the dark of the night (Crowley's Nightmare)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale thought that once the world was saved, Crowley would be able to sleep in peace. Unfortunately, the nightmares got worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the Good Omens FB page [Week_027_Nightmare](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Week_027_Nightmare) prompt.
> 
> CW: gore and violence within a disturbing dream, non-con but not sexual.

Aziraphale was under the coverlet but propped up on pillows, deep in a re-read of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. From his periphery he could hear Crowley's measured breath. It was a wonder, the ability to just let these bodies do as they would, for the nature of humans was to breathe without conscious thought, and so that was what Crowley was doing. 

There was a twitch from across the bed. He glanced over and could see the demon's brow was furrowed. Aziraphale reached over and stroked his hair. As he did so, he felt a shiver run down the long lean length of him. Aziraphale had seen humans and even dogs have dreams before, where the rapid eye movement rippled their eyelids, and their extremities moved as if to flail. He'd even been around sleepwalkers and sleep talkers, so none of this was new, but it was the first time he had seen it in a demon.

Aziraphale reached in, with very easing thoughts, to bless the mind and allow the unconsciousness to drift Crowley back to whatever he liked best. 

He felt a wild tendril of heat strike out against him, blazing with a sickly yellow aura, and he reeled back, shocked. 

Crowley's legs kicked out and he gasped, his body suddenly awash in sweat, eyes open and unseeing, his breath coming in great heaving gasps. 

"Crowley!" Aziraphale recovered himself from whatever had shot from Crowley's mind at his touch. He reached out to steady his quaking shoulder. "Sssshhhh. You are alright. Wake up." Crowley made a wretched noise in his throat and sat up, pulling his body back and out of his grasp. Aziraphale flinched, but continued. "It's alright. You're here. This is your room. Ssshhhh hush." His book hastily discarded on the side table, he tried again to put his hand on Crowley's arm. Crowley's firelit eyes were still unfocused, but he did not pull away. Aziraphale wrapped his arm around the demon's chest and drew him in. Stroked his hair and his neck and his back. And eventually, he fell back to sleep.

That had been the first. They hadn't spoken of it afterward, but it had rattled the angel. 

The cadence had increased after that, and eventually, they had to talk. To come up with a plan of how to deal with the disturbance of a tumultuous night. 

Aziraphale was holding him tight. Crowley's black wings were out and hung limp to the bed. He was shaking and his eyes were damp and clenched shut. 

"I couldn't move," he whispered, like he was telling a secret it pained him to share. And really, it was. To share these intimate inner fears was not easy. "He was covering my face. He had his hands all over my face."

"Who did?" the angel asked. 

"Satan. And no, he never did that in real life. At least, not that I remember."

Azirapahle moved his hands across Crowley's back to just graze his trembling wings. They rustled against the grey sheets and constricted slightly, tensing in. 

"His claws on my cheeks and at the corners of my mouth," Crowley continued, his voice hoarse. "At the corners of my eyes. And he wasn't asking why. He wasn't asking why I asked you to run away with me. He was telling me I was in love with an angel and he wanted me to confirm it. And I wouldn't. I wouldn't talk. Wouldn't say." He took a deep shuttering breath. "And I could tell he was choosing how to make me suffer. Would he chop me up into little bits? Gouge out my eyes? Crush my heart?"

Aziraphale stroked his fingers into the delicate feathers of Crowley's wings, letting his palm be a heavy, solid point of contact against the bones of him. The strength of him. 

Crowley went on. "He didn't do any of that. I couldn't move. His claws. They ran down my body. To the edge of my ribs. The bottom part right here. The curve. They hooked under me there. He split me open. Along the edge. His fingers wormed in and up. Went up in me. Up my chest cavity. My guts spilling out."

Aziraphale's own throat was dry and raw to hear it. He didn't want to hear it, didn't want to think it. But Crowley needed to say the words, to relate the story, to share the fear to make it less his. And so he merely drew him in even tighter and murmurer, "oh Crowley." 

Crowley turned to him then and opened his eyes. They were fully gold to the corners. "He inched up in me, claws curling and uncurling, scraping inside of me, like he was gathering fabric. His kept going up and up and up until he found my lungs. And he squeezed them. I couldn't breathe, Aziraphale. I couldn't.

"He wanted me to beg. He wanted me to beg him to stop and I couldn't talk and my mouth was open and I couldn't breathe."

He stopped. "It's all done right?" 

"It is. It's all over. You're here. I see you. Here I am and I love you."

Crowley curled into his chest, and as Aziraphale rubbed soothing circles on his shoulder-blades, his wings fluttered momentarily then melted back, disappearing into the night.

"I know," he said, and slid down to the bed. They folded themselves into a spooning position, Crowley swaddled from the back in the angel's firm and steadying grasp. Once he'd said the words, related the story, released it to the waking world, it lost it's power. And the demon was again able to sleep again. 


End file.
